From the Nominator

When faculty deans at UBC asked, "Which alumni are we retaining? Who are we losing? Where should we focus resources?" existing systems couldn't answer. The RIPL (Reporting Improvement Project in LINKS) Alumni Engagement Dashboard delivers this intelligence for teams serving 510,000+ living alumni across multiple faculties. RIPL represents UBC's multi-year initiative transforming data infrastructure across development and alumni engagement. We built on our 2020 CASE gold-winning Geo-Markets dashboard that established geographic intelligence to complete the vision with this engagement dashboard by adding temporal and behavioral insights. This dashboard answers: "How are they engaging over time?" We spotted a critical gap: Tracking retention, recapture, and acquisition required one to two weeks of manual work per quarter. This was fragile, vulnerable to staff turnover, and provided outdated insights. Working entirely in-house—four staff members from the services team and two to five alumni engagement staff—we architected four lifecycle metrics requiring significant data engineering. We addressed challenges common to universities: Defining engagement across diverse behaviors and building integrated data marts pulling from Blackbaud CRM, payment systems, and social media platforms. We redesigned data structures, built nightly refresh processes, and documented methodologies to institutionalize knowledge. Faculties now adjust strategies based on near real-time data resulting in improved outcomes. We eliminated six to eight weeks of annual manual work and freed staff for strategic planning, event design, and alumni outreach. When engagement metrics became visible, faculties voluntarily improved data entry accuracy and timeliness. We didn't just create dashboards. We re-engineered processes, built sustainable infrastructure, and freed people to focus on relationships with alumni who give, volunteer, and champion UBC.

From the Judges

Easy to visualize the alumni unit working in partnership with gifts officers including annual, major, planned giving, and corporate to engage and retain graduates.